Hardware Recomended HDD for Wii U?

[Draxikor]

Hi guys i want to buy a HDD for a hacked Wii U but it seems there is no official compatibility list for HDD, so i want to know what HDD you use, i want one with at least 1 Tb size and if its possible with external power. My first choice was to use a WD Elements and buy a USB Y cable but i want to hear other options, i appreciate the help.

PD: The main use for the HDD will be Wii U games, and probably eshop ones.

 

[PityOnU]

I was in the same boat as you recently. Just be aware - if you are only looking to play actual Wii U titles, the Wii U has a hard limit built into its menu of how many games it can actually display. I believe it is 300.

If you look on Metacritic at the top-rated Wii U titles, there are far less than that which are even worth playing.

Having an actual external HDD will require external power to be reliable, and will add yet another set of cables to the cabling mess that is the Wii U.

If it were me, I would instead use this SanDisk Ultra Fit drive. Reportedly, it pulls low enough power that it will work fine off of a single USB port - even the Wii U/PlayStation Classic's under-powered ones. Also pretty cheap. Was $30 recently.

It's not 1TB, but it's small and discrete and should look fairly clean once all is said and done.

 

[Draxikor]

I was in the same boat as you recently. Just be aware - if you are only looking to play actual Wii U titles, the Wii U has a hard limit built into its menu of how many games it can actually display. I believe it is 300.

If you look on Metacritic at the top-rated Wii U titles, there are far less than that which are even worth playing.

Having an actual external HDD will require external power to be reliable, and will add yet another set of cables to the cabling mess that is the Wii U.

If it were me, I would instead use this SanDisk Ultra Fit drive. Reportedly, it pulls low enough power that it will work fine off of a single USB port - even the Wii U/PlayStation Classic's under-powered ones. Also pretty cheap. Was $30 recently.

It's not 1TB, but it's small and discrete and should look fairly clean once all is said and done.

In fact i have a list of just 50 games that i want to play but all of them are about 300gb installed in total so at least ill need 500gb, also for what i read in this web usb drives are not recomended for this use because they will have low life expectancy vs and HDD.

 

[PityOnU]

In fact i have a list of just 50 games that i want to play but all of them are about 300gb installed in total so at least ill need 500gb,

In that case you should probably go with an external drive then. Pretty much anything will do as the ports are only USB 2.0 and will be saturated by basically any drive you slap on there. You already seem to understand the power restrictions/requirements, so that's about it, really.

also for what i read in this web usb drives are not recomended for this use because they will have low life expectancy vs and HDD.

Eh, those recommendations/concerns are a little overplayed. NAND storage has a limit on the number of writes that can be performed to the cells. On newer flash storage, that limit is actually very low. So in any situation that will regularly write to storage, typical USB drives (which are not designed targeting long-term use/reliability) are a poor choice. Notice that for all of this, I say WRITES - reading from the flash doesn't degrade it at all.

In this case, I'm assuming you would be using the external drive for storing games, and the internal flash on the system for storing saves. So how many times would you actually be writing to the external drive? The answer is once. So it should be fine. In fact, it would probably be more reliable than a mechanical spinning disk long-term, as the disk wears its components simply by being active, and can be damaged by sudden jolts. You will also have to deal with that annoying thing where the drive spins down after being inactive for a certain amount of time, making you then wait for it to spin back up the next time you need to read data from it. That spin up is also the most stressful thing you can do to the drive, so again, not great long term.

 

[Draxikor]

@PityOnU
Since the wii i buyed and hacked, i´ll prefer to use usb drives but the limit size from that time (5 years ago) obligated me to buy and HDD and at least the one i use never turn off spin, it seems that it constantly recieve signal so probably that reduced its life but well still works great.
In the case of the Wii U i dont bother to buy two 256gb drives like the sandisk you recomend but my biggest concern is the durability, i play a lot of time really, i can play daily about 4 hours and in my day off all the day, in fact i dont know anything about issues with usb drives on the wii u until i read about it, if the usb drives are good i certainly prefer them.

 

[PityOnU]

@PityOnU
Since the wii i buyed and hacked, i´ll prefer to use usb drives but the limit size from that time (5 years ago) obligated me to buy and HDD and at least the one i use never turn off spin, it seems that it constantly recieve signal so probably that reduced its life but well still works great.
In the case of the Wii U i dont bother to buy two 256gb drives like the sandisk you recomend but my biggest concern is the durability, i play a lot of time really, i can play daily about 4 hours and in my day off all the day, in fact i dont know anything about issues with usb drives on the wii u until i read about it, if the usb drives are good i certainly prefer them.

Well, there are no guarantees on anything in life, so you'll need to make your own choice.

It's worth keeping in mind, though - the Switch uses microSD cards as its main storage for games. Those are flash memory, just like USB drives. Maybe even less reliable, as they are smaller in size (concentrating heat and reducing likelihood of built-in redundancy). Most people don't seem to have a problem using them there. How is that any different than the Wii U?